WND EXCLUSIVE

Author: Good women are hard to find

'Where are the soft, feminine creatures that used to care about men?'

Drew Zahn covers movies for WND as a contributing writer. A former pastor, he is the editor of seven books, including Movie-Based Illustrations for Preaching & Teaching, which sparked his ongoing love affair with film and his weekly WND column, "Popcorn and a (world)view." Drew currently serves as communications director for The Family Leader.

“What I hear from men is that they want to love women, but that women have changed,” Venker explains in her column. “Where, they wonder, are the soft, feminine creatures that used to care about men and treat them with respect?

“They’re gone,” she concludes. “Today’s women are the daughters of committed feminists. They’ve been raised to shut off their girly side in order to prove something to themselves and the world.”

Venker asserts that the wave of the “sexual revolution” has washed away too much, that years of professors, journalists, writers and TV producers finding humor and barbed lessons in emasculating men to some how “empower” women has been a detriment to society and relationships, men and women.

“You can’t disempower one sex to empower the other,” she asserts. “It doesn’t work that way. It doesn’t matter how empowered, liberated or successful women are, men and women need each other.”

Venker, a former teacher-turned-social critic, says she learned her lessons the hard way. Divorced at age 27, a failed marriage forced her to re-examine her attitude and approach to relationships. She’s now happily living in the Midwest with her second husband of 15 years and two children.

Venker faults the sexual revolution and feminist movement of the last 40 years for creating women who believe they don’t need men and don’t need more from their relationships than, well … sex.

“Women lowered their standards,” she told WND. “They did this by changing the way they approach sex. That’s the No. 1 biggest issue. They’ve lost any sort of reasonable modesty or holding high standards and having a lot of self-respect in terms of the way they carry themselves and dress and how quickly they have sex.”

She added, “It’s funny, this whole ’empowerment’ idea was supposed to make women better and give them greater self-esteem. ‘Empowered’ is a great word, but it’s totally misused by feminists. Sexual empowerment does not mean sleeping around. In fact, the message is quite the opposite. It shows that you don’t think very much of yourself, that you don’t think you’re worthy of waiting for or committing to. Honestly, I think a lot of women have no idea that that’s how it works between women and men and that their behavior and attitude has driven men into a different direction.”

But how can women find men who are good husbands, fathers and providers?

Don’t look to feminists for the answers, Venker warns, but rather to women who have learned they need their men just as much as their men need them.

“Men have been hearing for years that women don’t need their money. They don’t need anything from men,” Venker said. “[So] men have just sort of given up. They just stop trying because you don’t need their money, you don’t need them as husbands and you’re sexually ’empowered.’ There’s just a whole different set of circumstances that women created, and that’s why men are the way they are.

The key to finding the right kind of guy, therefore, may be to become the right kind of gal.